Oldest building at Bellarmine boasts long history in San Jose neighborhood

The oldest building on the Bellarmine College Preparatory campus was constructed in 1916, but it didn't make it onto the campus until 1946.

Called the Polhemus House after its original owners, it is known to the Bellarmine community as Berchmans Hall, named for St. John Berchmans, a Jesuit seminarian who died in 1621.

Few on campus know anything about the building's actual history, and Ed Hodges would like that to change.

An avid local historian, Hodges says he had heard rumors about the house belonging to Commodore Robert Stockton, military governor of California from 1846 to 1847.

Hodges enlisted fellow College Park resident Scott Soper to help him research the structure.

They found that the Stockton connection came about because Stockton shipped a pre-fabricated house around Cape Horn in 1848 and then sold it to Charles B. Polhemus.

He placed the house at the corner of Stockton Avenue and what was then called Polhemus Street but is now named W. Taylor Street. Today the Salvation Army sits there.

That house burned in 1914, and a newspaper clipping from that time reported, "The flames spread with extraordinary rapidity. There were no firefighting facilities available."

Polhemus, one of the builders of the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad, hired William E. Higgins of the Wolfe and Higgins architecture firm to design a new house, which was completed on the same site in 1916.

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The two-story Dutch Colonial-style house remained the home of the extended Polhemus family until 1946, when it was sold to Bellarmine and moved to its present location at the corner of Elm and Hedding streets.

The archives at History San Jose include a photograph of the house being moved by Kelly Brothers House Movers, which is still in business.

The Rev. Gerald Wade, S.J., knows the building well and remembers when it was primarily a dorm for seniors.

Berchmans Hall was already on campus when he started as a student in the fall of 1951 and when he returned to campus in the early 1960s, he lived there.

"My two years living in that hall as a young Jesuit, from 1963 to 1965, were really wonderful years. Almost to a man they were great young men, and we formed a real family," Wade says.

"We had a big Christmas dinner and barbecues. It was kind of fun to live in the hall; it wasn't like a regular dorm."

Wade recalls overseeing the 45 young residents who were housed in two rooms in the attic and in bunk beds on both the first and second floors.

"The seniors smoked in the recreation hall in the basement and they had a pool table and a television set," Wade says. "You really were their substitute parents and responsible for taking care of them."

Wade says after O'Donnell Hall was built in 1967, Berchmans Hall was no longer used as a dorm and served as the infirmary for resident students, while school nurses lived in the house.

Bellarmine initially had boarders because families from throughout Northern and Central California wanted their sons to go there.

Students included scions of wine families, such as the Mondavis and the Krugs as well as Dennis and Phillip Crosby, the twin sons of crooner Bing Crosby.

As other Catholic high schools were built in California and the number of boarders dwindled to 100 out of 1,200 students, Bellarmine ended the money-losing practice in 1983.

Wade recalls Pat Taylor, former head prefect for boarders, moving into the house with his wife after their marriage.

More recently Berchmans Hall has been home to Quirino Arias, his wife Theresa and their children.

Arais works in maintenance for the school and having him on campus all the time is an advantage, says Wade.

The Bellarmine Mothers' Guild now uses the basement for storage.

Wade, who stepped down as president of Bellarmine in 2006 but still lives on campus, says the former Polhemus House is "by far the oldest" structure on campus.

In the 1980s the buildings dating to when the campus was the University of the Pacific, before it relocated to Stockton, were torn down. UOP sold the campus to Bellarmine for $77,500 in 1925. (The sale was a good deal for UOP as it paid $72,000 for 435 acres in he 1860s and then sold off housing lots starting in 1866, which is why the nearby neighborhood is called College Park.)

More recently, the single-story classrooms and theater built in 1948 were demolished to make way for new structures.

Wade says he considers Berchmans Hall a campus landmark and expects it to continue in use for the foreseeable future.

Hodges would like to put a plaque up on the house, incorporating the historic photo of its move and its history.

In 2004, Hodges put a plaque up at Hoover Middle School, where he taught science before retiring, to share the history of the stained glass window located on a landing between the first and second floors.

His sleuthing there revealed it was a piece of New Deal art constructed in 1939.